Automatic call distributors (ACDs) are specialized systems designed to match incoming requests for service, for example a telephone call or an e-mail, with a resource that is able to provide that service, for example a human contact center agent. ACDs generally perform one or more of the following functions: (i) recognize and answer incoming calls; (ii) review database(s) for instructions on what to do with a particular call; (iii) using these instructions, identify an appropriate agent and queue the call, often times providing a prerecorded message; and (iv) connect the call to an agent as soon as the agent is available.
The term automatic call distributor comes from distributing the incoming calls in a logical pattern to a group of agents. That pattern may be uniform (to distribute the work uniformly), or it may be top-down (the same agents in the same order get the calls and are kept busy, the ones on the top typically being kept busier than the ones on the bottom), or it may be specialty routing, where calls are routed to agents who are most likely able to help the caller the most. ACDs typically offer a varying degree of customization to system configuration that enable the manager of the ACD system to control how calls are allocated to agents.
Skill-based routing is an ACD feature that provides for the selection of an appropriate agent for handling a particular call. With this feature, agents are registered with their skills set as resources for handling calls. The caller may indicate the skill that she requires for a particular transaction, and the system may either find the appropriate resource or queue the caller until the resource with the requested skill becomes available.